


the miracle girl and danger's sensation

by timetravelings



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-11
Updated: 2013-08-11
Packaged: 2017-12-23 02:45:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/921071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/timetravelings/pseuds/timetravelings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Mako was still in Academy, she subscribed to Jaeger-groupie teen magazines and nursed an embarrassing crush for Raleigh Becket. She forgot about it, eventually, but things come to light.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the miracle girl and danger's sensation

Mail days at the Academy always managed to perk Mako up at the beginning of the week.

She didn’t get excited about the mail the way most of her classmates did. Most of the others, if not from especially affluent families, at least had _someone_ writing to them on a regular basis – concerned parents from inland, a fretting girlfriend – even the rare few who had pilots for parents themselves got the occasional encouraging note scribbled from Los Angeles or Lima or wherever the last attack was. Mako, with two dead parents and nobody else willing to write to her (Stacker didn’t count, seeing as she saw him every day) knew better than to long for that.

However, what she _did_ get was the newest issue of _Jaeger-14_ the first Monday of every month.

It was one of those American teen tabloids, with every page bursting in neon candy-colored print and its featured articles padded with fluff, most of its stories highlighting the latest rising stars of the Kaiju War in that sugary, salacious way somehow unique to these kinds of publications. It was one of Mako's favorite things in the entire world.

And so, like always, she peered into her mail unit on Monday morning before breakfast, eagerly tearing off the plastic wrapping and tucking the magazine in her jacket with a small smile.

She sipped her juice box intermittently as she flipped through the glossy pages. Mako usually sat alone at breakfast anyway, so she knew it wasn’t like she was going to be shutting anyone out. It wasn’t that people didn’t like her, or even that she didn’t like other people, but she’d always been separate from the other Jaeger kids in a way that she would never quite be able to bridge. It didn’t bother her that much; she was top of the class and she knew why she was here. God forbid she try to be a normal sixteen-year-old once in a while.

Besides, she liked to think of it as a _sort_ of training – practicing her English, recognizing what she was going to become. If she got to see some shirtless chests at the same time, there was no harm done.

Mako scanned the front page, looking for anything familiar.  She recognized most of the cover stars from glances at video comms in Stacker’s office – there, the Wei triplets were posing next to Crimson Typhoon, all of them grinning. She felt herself smiling too – it was nice to see them there. Sometimes they’d stop by the Academy to consult on attack strategies or a piece of combat machinery, and they’d always treated her like a little sister. In the upper right-hand corner were the Kaidonovskys, those Russian phenoms who held the longest neural handshake record, both wearing identical scowls. And there, featured front and center, were the American Becket brothers – they’d left the Academy only the year before she’d joined, and had four Kaiju kills to their names already. According to the cover, there was an exclusive interview with them and free pullout posters starting on page eighteen.

Mako flipped to page eighteen immediately, juice box forgotten.

True to their word, there was a six-page spread of Yancy and Raleigh Becket, evidently the newest star pilots on the rise. It wasn’t like she didn’t know who they were – she’d heard Stacker swearing over them than once (though she’d always been too polite to admit she’d heard). It was Raleigh she knew more about – maybe it was the fact that he was closer to her age, or because he seemed to be the target of the _majority_ of Stacker’s swearing. He was 6’1, and had one of those stupid slightly-open-mouthed, puppy dog gazes going on in his pullout poster on page twenty, and she was in love.

She pored over the interview with him on the next page (creatively titled _DANGER’S_ SENSATION! THE YOUNGER BECKET BROTHER REVEALS ALL). Mako was, admittedly, slightly disappointed with the editorial staff of _Jaeger-14_ as she read through, wishing they could have asked more questions about tips on finding the weak spots on Category-IV Kaiju – which she would have found genuinely useful – rather than relentlessly grilling Raleigh on his dating life (which, she realized happily, seemed to be nonexistent).

 

* * *

 

There was a quiz on page thirty that supposedly informed the reader which famous young Jaeger pilot he or she would have been drift-compatible with. It was dumb, one of those features that took ten minutes to come up with, but yet Mako was intrigued. She wanted to know, if only for the sake of education, who she would be best-equipped to pilot a giant robot with. She reasoned that it  _could_  come in handy if there was ever an emergency.

_1\. If there was a Kaiju attack on your city, would you run away or try to fight it?_

Mako frowned. The question hit a little too close to home. She filled in the option of  _'try to fight it'_  with a little too much vehemence, and her marking pen tore a hole through the page. Next question.

_2\. If you were ever forced to fight someone, would you prefer hand-to-hand combat or using a weapon, such as a sword?_

She paused, and then bubbled in the circle next to  _'sword.'_

_3\. Would you rather wear a hoodie or a sweater?_

Well, that was obvious. Sweater.

_4\. Would your ideal date be in Hawaii (assuming the official Pan Pacific Defense Corps travel ban is lifted) or Alaska?_

Well, she was  _in_ Alaska, but since the military's most recent geographic surveys indicated Hawaii was currently submerged under floodwaters that seemed to be an aftereffect of the latest Kaiju emerging from the Breach, it seemed like the latter was her only option. Mako briefly glanced down at the other questions, hoping the rest of them weren't as terrible, but they all seemed to be similar, and she wasn't sure if these facts had any actual effect on drift compatibility (she made a note to ask someone in the research division about drafting a potential drift compatibility test for students that would be genuinely effective).

Impatience getting the better of her, she skipped down to the bottom, where they had the key for the quiz and tallied up all her answers so far.  _Did you answer all Bs? Your ideal copilot would be Raleigh Becket, the younger Becket brother and copilot of Gipsy Danger (KAIJU KILL COUNT: 4)! His hometown is Anchorage, Alaska, his interests include rollercoasters, candy, and reading about World War II . . ._

She smiled to herself and stopped reading there, tearing out the page and folding it into a neat square before she slipped it in her pocket.

 

* * *

 

 

During free time, Mako liked to stay busy – she’d usually sign up for extra combat sessions in the Kwoon or go to help Newt (Professor Geiszler, really, but no one ever called him that) in the research labs. But on the days when _Jaeger-14_ s came, she was always preoccupied.

She spread the magazine pages across her bunk and dug out her scissors. Actually, they weren’t really _hers_ – wartime called for most scrap metal to be melted down for Jaegers, and the standard school-supply kind had all but been phased out of production – Mako had “borrowed” a pair of rusty utility scissors from Newt’s office a few months ago asking if she could use it for a project. She was one of his favorite students anyway, so she figured he wouldn’t have minded if she kept them a little longer.

Mako painstakingly traced the figures with the scissor blade, making sure to catch the edges of hair and bent elbows and hips. It was a childish hobby, and she knew the magazines were just dumb Jaeger-fly fodder, but making pilot collages gave her a feeling of purpose outside of training for battle. Maybe, after all this was over, she could turn to crafting. It was probably therapeutic somehow. 

She felt a flush of pride as she finished cutting out the cover stars of this month’s issue, and she unscrewed the cap to her glue bottle (it was the strong stuff, the kind derived from Kaiju saliva, and it had been a birthday gift from Stacker for her engineering projects). Mako pasted the cutouts onto a fresh sheet of paper in her notebook, occasionally stopping to scribble heart shapes in the margins with her marking pen. She’d disassemble the entire magazine with care, tearing out each individual poster to hang on her wall.

She took a minute to glance over her handiwork, and when she was satisfied, she put the notebook back in her old blue shoebox and stowed it neatly under her bunk. Mako’s wall was plastered with pictures of Jaeger pilots and the latest Mark technology, whatever scraps of news she could snag from the outside.

 _I’ll belong up there too, someday,_ she thought to herself. She thought of little girls in the future pasting photos of Mako Mori, the world-famous Kaiju slayer, on their own bedroom walls.  

 

* * *

 

 

She was certain that the entirety of the Pan Pacific Defense Corps knew she had a crush.

It hadn’t really been a secret in the first place that she liked the Jaeger-groupie magazines. People hadn’t been _mean,_ not exactly, but no one seemed to pass up an opportunity to remind her of the fact. Maybe people thought it was funny that the matchless Mako Mori was just as human as the rest of them. Ever since Chuck Hansen had passed her in the mess hall laughing, “Becket, huh? Well, you could do a lot worse,” the facts had been inescapable.

Whatever. She could have responded by doing something entirely childish and passive-aggressive, like slipping the 2014 _People_ magazine that listed Chuck’s father as the Sexiest Man Alive under the door to his room, but Mako resisted the urge to do that. She knew Chuck wasn't nice, not really, but he was sixteen like her and his mother was dead and she wasn't going to be that petty.

Stacker inevitably found out, because Stacker figured out everything that went on around the base, and after he called her into his office for an extremely embarrassing conversation (“No one’s teasing you, are they, Mako?” “ _No_ , father . . .  "), it was business as usual.

When she left his office, she could have sworn she heard him talking to someone on the video comms, muttering about “that goddamn Becket kid, I don’t know how many goddamned Kaiju he’s sent to hell, that upstart is a pain in my ass and I _swear_ if he ever meets my daughter next time he comes to Alaska –"

 

* * *

 

Like any teenage heartache, it didn’t take too long to get over. She eventually forgot about renewing her _Jaeger-14_ subscription and threw herself into the actual Jaeger restoration projects. She left Academy, and a new class of bright-eyed pilots-in-training filled the gap.

Despite the fact that funding was harder to come by now, she liked being assigned to Hong Kong. She couldn’t hide her pride when they finally finished fixing up the Becket brothers’ Jaeger, five years later with one of them dead and the other in who-knows-where, working on the Anti-Kaiju Wall. Mako didn’t even remember the connection.

It was only when Stacker, with an overtly meaningful look, asked her to compile a candidate list of copilots for Raleigh Becket, that she remembered that phase from four years ago. The box was still hidden under her bunk – she wasn’t quite sure why, but she’d taken it to China with her. She thought about throwing it in the industrial waste incinerator, but eventually decided against it.

It was a gloomy day when they arrived back, and the Shatterdome deck was slick with rain. Mako was slightly eager despite herself to catch a glimpse of the surviving Becket brother, who should have been one of the greatest pilots of his age before that infamous 2020 crash. They'd stopped featuring him as a cover star for teen magazines after that, she guessed.

When she got closer, she noticed he had a welding goggles tan. From being in construction, presumably, but _still –_ somewhere inside of her, there was a disappointed sixteen-year-old girl. She bit the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling.

“I imagined him differently,” she said, shooting Stacker what she hoped was an equally meaningful look.

 

* * *

 

It’d been nearly a month since closing the Breach, and their days had almost slipped into something resembling regularity. They were still in Hong Kong, cleaning up the damage and overseeing any further research efforts – there was still a lot to be learned from the Kaiju, and a lot of non-military uses for the Jaegers, after all. Things were starting to come together again, in all senses of the word. 

Every Monday morning, he and Mako both sat on the cliffs overlooking Victoria Harbor, watching the ships that flitted in and out of port. They were a welcome sight, a reminder that the end of the Kaiju War had made Pacific waters safe again.

“Hey, I brought you something today,” Raleigh said, grinning as he sat down next to her. He handed her a narrow orange box. “Look what’s inside.”

She gave him a funny look, of the _I’m certain you’re up to something, but I’m not sure what_ variety, but opened the lid. “Oh my _gosh,”_ she said. “Where’d you find this? This must be at least ten years old.”

It was a box of newspaper and magazine clippings, the first headline reading _‘THE MIRACLE GIRL: TOKYO’S DAUGHTER, SOLE SURVIVOR OF ONIBABA, NOW THE YOUNGEST TO ENROLL IN JAEGER ACADEMY.’_ There were two grainy pictures accompanying the text – the first one was that iconic image of a thirteen-year-old girl standing in the wreckage, holding one red shoe, and the second was a slight, unhappy-looking teenager sporting long black hair with clumsily dyed blue tips. Raleigh stole another glance at Mako. She was rifling through the box and crying.

His very first thought was, _Oh, no. I fucked it all up. She probably doesn’t want to think about the past and now she’s crying. Oh, Jesus Christ, she’s going to kick my ass, and she’s going to kill me, and she’ll never talk to me again, she’s so amazing and I messed it all up –_ And that’s when he realized she was laughing. He was positive he could even hear her laughing at him inside his own head. It was one of those _Wow, Becket, you’re so dumb, but I like you_ laughs. He only recognized it because it came so frequently.

“Actually, Raleigh, I’m serious, where’d you find them?” she asked, thumbing through a stack of photos. "I didn't know I was  _famous._  Not back then, at least."

“We were going through the archives yesterday and we found all the old newspapers from the twenty-tens. You wouldn’t believe how much stuff is in there. I, uh, may have added some stuff of my own in there.” A grin slowly crept onto his face. “Besides, I thought it was a fitting gift for you, in return for all those _Jaeger-14_ cutouts.” He placed the familiar blue shoebox in front of her, filled to the brim with those old magazine trimmings.

A furious red blush bloomed in Mako’s cheeks. “You – ”

"Herc and I found them when we were cleaning out bunks a week ago. You were on relief duty in the city, remember?” He paused to gauge her reaction again. “Well, if it makes you feel better, if we were in the same year at Academy, I bet I would have done so many stupid things for you. I would have fallen head over heels at first sight, and instead of taking notes during engineering class I would have written in my notebook about how you were the prettiest girl in the whole world and how you were going to save it one day, and I would have done _way_ more embarrassing things than making some cut-and-paste wall collages.”

He chose not to mention the fact that he actually _was_ in the possession of a lovingly crafted Mako Mori-themed wall collage, because she didn’t need to know that, and even if she did, she’d find out at some point already. There were only so many secrets two people could keep after they’d been in each other’s minds.

She elbowed him in the shoulder and suddenly seized one of the photos in the box. “Like what? Would it have been more or less embarrassing than that shirtless photoshoot in front of the Anchorage Shatterdome you did in 2019?” 

Raleigh cringed. “Much, much worse.”

Mako suddenly burst out laughing again. When he wondered aloud what was so funny, she replied, "Oh . . . no, it's nothing. It's just that I took a quiz in one of those magazines once and it said we'd be drift compatible. Isn't that funny?"

"Are you serious? What, were the questions like, _''Which hotshot star pilot could you see yourself bonding with over mutual loss and bringing out your greatest potential?"_ That seems pretty deep for _Jaeger-14."_ He stared at the contents of the boxes scattered before them. “But hey, you know, ever since we closed the Breach, the press has been the PPDC’S best friend again, right? I’ll bet _we_ get picked as the next cover stars, both of us.”

“Oh, no. They’ll probably make us do one of those horrible photoshoots. I'm certain  _People_ will call for interviews within the week.”

“Or worse, there’ll be an _E! True Shatterdome Story._ That is what they call those, right, ever since Insurrector actually destroyed Hollywood last year?”

She laughed. “They would name it something ridiculous, like _The Miracle Girl and Danger’s Sensation._ It would be two hours long, and they would have a dramatic reenactment of how we first met, and it would explain how we saved the world through the power of love. _”_

“That makes us sound like we’re superheroes.”

She pushed the boxes away then, bridging the distance between them, and Raleigh seemed to anticipate her movements, just like they were in the Drift again. He drew her in close for a kiss, his fingers tucking back her bangs and tracing her jawline.

“Well,” Mako finally replied, smiling, “Aren’t we?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
